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Churchill understood what Progressives want

**Posted by Phineas

“Wisdom”

It’s a heckuva busy day today with little time for posting, but I have to share this gem via Steven Hayward at Power Line. It’s an excerpt from a longer quote from Winston Churchill’s closing speech in the 1945 General Election, which the Conservatives sadly lost. Read these two paragraphs, and tell me if you don’t recognize the modern Democratic Party, at least by reflection:

Look how even today they hunger for controls of every kind, as if these were delectable foods instead of wartime inflictions and monstrosities. There is to be one State to which all are to be obedient in every act of their lives. The State is to be the arch-employer, the arch-planner, and arch-administrator and ruler and the arch-caucus-boss. . .

A Socialist State once thoroughly completed in all its details and its aspects—and that is what I am speaking of—could not afford to suffer opposition. . . Socialism is, in its essence, an attack not only upon British enterprise, but upon the right of the ordinary man or woman to breathe freely without having a harsh, clumsy, tyrannical hand clapped across their mouths and nostrils. . . Have we not heard Mr Herbert Morrison descant upon his plans to curtail Parliamentary procedure and pass laws simply by resolution of broad principle in the House of Commons, afterward to be left by Parliament to the executive and to the bureaucrats to elaborate and enforce by departmental regulations?

Churchill was of course criticizing the British Labour Party, which had been founded as an explicitly Socialist, albeit non-Marxist, party, but how well this describes President Obama and the dominant left wing of the Democratic Party! The worship of the administrative state, government by regulation and “boards of experts,” the inescapable, inexorable need to control everything — that bolded portion illustrates the progressive “theory of legislation” perfectly: pass a vaguely-worded bill, and let the unelected bureaucrats fill in the details with the full force of law. I’m surprised Goldberg didn’t quote this in “Liberal Fascism.”

Be sure to read the rest. While Hayward is thinking of Obamacare and the IRS scandal, I think Churchill’s quote reflects the heart of the professional Democratic Party in general.

Hundreds of thousands of pages in the federal register. Bureacratic regulation, all carrying the force of all, none of which was ever voted upon by anyone.

Obamacare and the Dodd/Frank financial regulation bills are prime examples of this. Obamacare creates/expands 52 new agencies/bureacracies/boards/panels and EMPOWERS ALL OF THEM TO WRITE THEIR OWN REGULATIONS. Dodd/Frank sets up the CFPB to have complete control over, essentially, the entire economy. Any good/service that anyone ever buys falls under their purview.

All of this is clearly unconstitutional, yet the Supreme Court has, repeatedly, supported the practice.

Its unconstitutional because Congress, alone, has authority to write legislation, to be signed into law by the president. Congress does NOT have the authority to delegate this function to any other body, and certainly not to an administrative bureaucracy run by the Executive branch, and headed by a political appointee of the President.

What we have, instead, is the bureaucracy makes ‘regulations’ and ‘rules’ with the force of law. No one ever votes on them. The President doesn’t have to sign them for them to take effect. They simply make them up however they please and announce them as ‘final rules’, and then, immediately, we all have to live by them. To repeal one of these rules/regulations requires the House/Senate to vote to overturn them and the President to sign the law that overturns the regulation.

That’s a high bar. The bureaucracies, headed by a political appointee of the president, do what the President wants, so you’ll never overturn a regulation until a president from an opposing party takes office, and even then you need control of both the House and Senate as well as the Presidency.

In effect, it means that the US is functionally a Dictatorship. The President doesn’t rule by decree (well, he does, actually, through Executive Orders and ‘signing statements), but rather he has the bureaucracies he controls quietly publish rules/regulations that govern us in the minutest detail in virtually every aspect of our lives.

It would be extremely disruptive to the Democrap policy-making (whether by Democraps or their Republican enablers) to have to vote on every single rule and regulation, so they abdicate the responsibility by assigning it to their “inferiors.”

Besides, if they had to vote on every single rule and regulation, people might get the idea that the endgame of it all was to control every aspect of life here in the United States, and we wouldn’t want the rabble to get hold of THAT idea now, would we?

The favorite target of conservatives is the Dept. of Education, but I believe a lot more could be accomplished by ridding our coming fascist state of the EPA first, then the Dept. of Ed. The jackboot tactics of the EPA are IMHO a much more immediate danger to our country, and are exactly what Churchill was talking about.